Saturday, November 6, 2010

Acorn garland

I came across this blog post a few days ago, at A Beautiful Mess. It was a tutorial on making an acorn garland! I just took down my candy corn garland so this looked perfect! I went on the search for faux wood grain contact paper, but with no luck. I checked Wal-Mart but instead of checking Target as well, I went to Lowe's and did some aisle roaming till I found something that would work. As luck would have it, my materials ended up being super cheap! I believe contact paper would have been $3.99 for each roll, and I would need two rolls, in different shades. I ended up in the wood flooring section of Lowe's and found these strips off wood grain laminate for less than $2 each. I bought 4 strips and the total was less than $5. AND after making the project, I ended up only using one strip of each, so this could be made for about $2.50!

Print out the pdf acorn drawing by clicking on the tutorial link above. For some reason I couldn't get my printer to cooperate this morning so I drew one myself.

Here are the strips, they are thick, but can still be cut with scissors, and can be punched with a regular hole punch!

Cut out your bottom part of the acorn out of the lighter wood grain.Then cut the top part out of the darker strip.

Originally, I just peeled a strip off of the back of the acorn top and thought it would be sticky enough to hold the acorn together...wrong! My husband said I made realistic acorns because the drop in the fall. SO... run a line of hot glue on the top of the arorn bottom piece, and push it onto the back of the acorn top piece. Otherwise, they are just too heavy to stick together.

Punch your holes and run your twine or ribbon through the holes. I wanted twine, but didn't have any. I settled for brown raffia ribbon that I had on hand.